Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

Applebaum, Anne

ISBN 10: 0385549938 / ISBN 13: 9780385549936

Published by Doubleday (edition ), 2024

About this Item

With dust jacket. The item might be beaten up but readable. May contain markings or highlighting, as well as stains, bent corners, or any other major defect, but the text is not obscured in any way.

Seller Inventory # 0385549938-7-1-29

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World
• Publisher: Doubleday (edition )
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385549938
• ISBN 13: 9780385549936
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Fair
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

About this title

Synopsis

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer-prize winning author, an alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Economist, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, The Times

"A masterful guide to the new age of authoritarianism... clear-sighted and fearless.”—John Simpson, The Guardian

"Especially timely."—The Washington Post

We think we know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.

But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which operate across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another. The police in one country can arm and train the police in another, and propagandists share resources and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.

International condemnation and economic sanctions cannot move the autocrats. Even popular opposition movements, from Venezuela to Hong Kong to Moscow, don't stand a chance. The members of Autocracy, Inc, aren't linked by a unifying ideology, like communism, but rather a common desire for power, wealth, and impunity. In this urgent treatise, which evokes George Kennan's essay calling for "containment" of the Soviet Union, Anne Applebaum calls for the democracies to fundamentally reorient their policies to fight a new kind of threat.

About the Author

After seventeen years as a columnist at The Washington Post, ANNE APPLEBAUM became a staff writer at The Atlantic in January 2020. She is the author of five critically acclaimed and award-winning books: Twilight of Democracy, Red Famine, Iron Curtain, Between East and West, and Gulag, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. She divides her time between Poland, where her husband is foreign minister, and Washington, D.C.